Doolally about Docker

11 July 2016

The UKOUG Systems newsletter - July

The month of May saw this year’s UKOUG Systems Event take place – and with a 25% increase on attendance over last year, delegates were able to grow their network and share their expertise with a wider audience. With an interactive and engaging three stream agenda, a fantastic day was had by all – to get the low-down on what else happened on the day, take a look at the article.

One key topic of this year’s first SIG and the UKOUG Systems Event was Oracle's SPARC M7 release. As the year has progressed we’ve seen blogs and articles giving insights into its first class security features and silicon secured memory and as the industry changes, new topics and products are being developed.With a new edition to the SPARC family announced just weeks ago, you can now take to the cloud with the SPARC S7 microprocessor. “While the business benefits of the public cloud are increasingly clear, many organisations have yet to move enterprise workloads to the cloud due to performance, security and management concerns” (www.oracle.com). The SPARC S7 “is an eight-core 4th-generation 64-bit SPARC processor running at 4.27GHz and fabricated using a 20nm process” and contains the same SSM features as the M7 chip. With its silicon secured memory using “the most-significant bits of memory addresses and pointers to "colour" blocks of RAM” (www.theregister.co.uk) you can easily spot bugs or issues and stop the running thread.

With all this SPARC talk floating around the industry, there’s been another key word making its way through the ranks, and that word is DOCKER. “Docker containers wrap a piece of software in a complete filesystem that contains everything needed to run: code, runtime, system tools, and system libraries – anything that can be installed on a server” (www.docker.com). With a simple interface & set of commands you can create and manage containers & avoid virtualised hardware. Containers share a common base and have only isolated process spaces, thus saving you space within the operating system, as the containers rest on top of a single Linux or Solaris instance. This means “you can have as many as four-to-six times the number of server application instances as you can using Xen or KVM VMs on the same hardware” (www.zdnet.com).

You can access and share containers with others - and as you can build the environment into the container, you can deploy your application with the knowledge that no matter the environment, it will still run the same. Combine this with support from automation tools like: Ansible, Chef, Jenkins, Puppet, Salt, Vagrant & it can help aid collaboration between developers, testers and the sys admins – which is great news for DevOps.

Docker’s success stems from the fact it spans both the developer and sysadmin domains, and with an international drive within IT to adopt both private and public cloud infrastructures – there’s a continuing momentum towards a DevOps paradigm for the software lifecycle – it’s no surprise Docker has taken the IT world by storm.

With Docker being such a key software in today’s IT market, we’ll be discussing it at our October UKOUG Systems SIG meeting. Following on from his article in the Autumn edition of Oracle Scene, Anthony Macey will be presenting on Docker – giving you the low-down on what it is and how to utilise it for your business at an introductory and intermediate level.

With one UKOUG Systems SIG to go this year, you can register your place now! Keep your eyes peeled for the launch of the agenda this summer, and remember to look out for the fantastic systems content coming your way at our Tech16 conference & exhibition (5th - 7th Dec). If you have any questions on UKOUG events or our UKOUG Systems Newsletter, please do get in touch.

You will be interested in...

Registration for this year's UKOUG Technology Conference & Exhibition 2016 will be opening at the end of July! With three action packed days of content, we're bringing you 27 educational Systems sessions this December. Keep your eyes peeled for the launch, or fill in this form to register your interest and receive updates on each stage of the conference, all the way up until the event itself.

Oracle's SPARC S7press release. Oracle's performance and bestpractices article around memory and bisection bandwidth for a S7 processor server.Computerworld's article on the S7 microprocessor, discussing how this chip moves Oracle into the commodity priced platforms. The Register's article on how Inifiniband can be fitted within S7 based machines, but won't be piped directly in and out of the CPU package. The article also looks at the chips silicon secured memory features. An impartial overview of the S7 microprocessor from V3

DOCKER Oracle Scene features Docker articles from Red Stack Tech's James Anthony. Read Part 1 & Part 2 for an introductory and intermediate look at Docker. Blog post acting as an introductory look into Docker, with simplified terms for beginners. Docker's explanation of the product on their website.Opensource.com's insights into what Docker is and who it is for, with a slight discussion of Docker security.ZDNets insights into why Docker is growing in popularity. Article on opensource.com written by Red Hat's Daniel Walsh into Docker security. Oracle run container projects which you can try out for yourself here. Want to try a Docker beta for Windows? Now you can! Catch up on all the latest from this year's Dockercon.

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